With the achievement of high communication rates, video content distribution services via the Internet have been started. Along with such diversification of information media, development is progressing in the area of various broadband information media, and accordingly, the number of viewing channels is increasing. At the same time, with an increase in bidirectional information media, great changes are foreseen in viewer behavior, including on-demand viewing and so on. These trends are expected to accelerate even faster in the future.
Along with the above, the average viewing rating for each medium is expected to gradually decline. In television and radio advertising it is already becoming difficult to achieve the same advertising effect as in the past by using advertisements inserted between various contents or with a part of the contents.
Therefore, in allocating a limited advertising budget between various information media, there is a desire on the part of an advertiser to achieve the best possible cost effectiveness through differentiated advertisement distributions, such as those that closely match the tastes of individual distribution viewers, instead of the averaged form of distribution, as in the past.
In the distribution of advertising, the number of viewers in a targeted group of viewers that are reached by the advertiser (reach) and the number of times the advertising reaches viewers, are criteria indicating the effectiveness of advertising.
In advertising for television broadcasts, time slots for advertising are established for each program (program advertising slots). For each program advertising slot, a prediction is made as to the viewer group (age, gender, and the like) and the degree to which the viewing is done. These predictions are made considering broadcast time, program content, and viewing rating. An advertising broadcast plan (program advertising slot purchasing plan) is developed in order to respond to the desires of the advertiser with regard to reach and frequency for each targeted group.
When advertising is distributed via the Internet to a viewer terminal along with video content, or when an advertisement comprising video information in an information screen is distributed, because it is possible for the same video content or information screen to distribute different advertising depending upon the viewer, the concept of an advertisement time slot is provided for each viewing time (this is called a viewing time advertisement slot).
Compared with the program advertising slot in television broadcasting, the viewing time advertisement slot enables not prediction but rather specification of viewers. It enables more precisely targeted advertising. However, since the number of advertisement slots changes depending upon the overall viewing time of viewers, it is not possible to pre-establish an advertisement slot.
In the manual allocations of the past, it was too complex to perform detailed allocation of advertisements in diversified information media, and such a detailed allocation has become increasingly more difficult to accommodate.
To handle this type of situation, in Japanese Patent Application No. 2000-48217 (Unexamined Published Japanese Patent Application No. (JP-A) 2001-236444), for example, a method for advertising distribution is proposed. This method prepares and quantifies a plurality of attributes common to advertisements, determines the distribution frequency and distribution sequence that reflect distribution conditions from the distribution side and the viewer side, generates an advertisement sequence schedule, performs scheduling and generates a time schedule for advertisements for which the distribution time band and distribution sequence have been specified, synthesizes the above-noted two schedules and performs re-scheduling to create a final distribution schedule, and distributes advertisements from the distribution side to the viewer side while observing the time, in accordance with this distribution schedule.
Japanese Patent Application No. 2000-53305 (International Publication No. 01/89216) proposes a technology aimed at achieving a desired total number of reproductions for the advertisement by generating and managing a plan for the upper limit of the number of placements for each terminal, considering viewer attributes, and also controlling the placement sequence in accordance with the desires of the advertiser.